The band Brandon Flowers said would last 100 years from now: “Their songs are universal”
There’s no set way for artists to know whether their songs will be timeless. It’s one thing to write a track that might hold up in a few years, but making something that spans generations of people and still resonates the same way as it did upon release isn’t something that can be planned out in advance. It just comes down to whether the song holds up, and as far as Brandon Flowers saw it, The Police had everything that makes a timeless rock and roll band.
This is strange because The Police were already a bit out of time when they first started. Whereas most rock bands start out when they’re still young men, every member of the power trio, while still young, had already been seasoned veterans of the rock scene, either turning in time behind the scenes as songwriters or working with technical acts to expand their song-crafting.
When Sting presented his songs to Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers, though, something different was at play. Sure, they had something in common with genres like punk and reggae from around the same time, but there was always a great melody holding down everything on songs like ‘Roxanne’ or ‘Message in a Bottle’.
For all of the great songs that they could string together, one of their odd quirks was how Sting chose to write lyrics. Everyone has their traditional ‘I love you’ ballads in their arsenal, but every one of The Police’s debut singles had to do with something outlandish, whether it’s the space travel of ‘Walking on the Moon’, the everyday struggles of being a hooker on ‘Roxanne’, or whatever the hell’s going in the chaos of ‘Synchronicity II’.
While Flowers would eventually take cues from the sound of 1980s new wave and pop, he had a healthy respect for everything The Police did, telling Rolling Stone, “Their songs are universal — they’re part of all of our lives. You hear them on both pop and classic rock stations, and they’ll be played on the radio in Germany 100 years from now. At the same time, everything they did was really smart and worked on a few levels; you could love a particular song, then realise a year later that you had totally missed the meaning.”
There’s a lot of truth to Sting not sticking to one theme with his lyrics, but part of the appeal of The Police was not knowing wherever you were getting on the musical side of things either. Outlandos D’Amour holds up as a decent record of the new wave movement, but by the time they reached the 1980s, songs like ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’ went through multiple different movements, turning from a moody pop song in the verses to a calypso tune for the chorus.
Then again, that was partly why the group managed to stay together for as long as they did. They had been around the block as players more than a few times, so there was no reason for them to just repeat a formula that they knew worked and base their entire career on it.
And by the time they closed up shop on Synchronicity, they were still innovating, balancing out the silly pop songs like ‘Every Breath You Take’ with jazz-rock freakouts like ‘Murder By Numbers’. Flowers certainly took those same brave strides in his own career when making records like Sam’s Town, but when looking at The Police as a whole, they could feasibly say that they did everything they could as a group towards the end.
